Loving Time (18 page)

“What? What makes you think Ray
partied
, as you put it, with anyone?”

“Well, he didn’t party alone. There were semen stains from two different people on his sheets.”

“Jesus.” Tom closed his eyes again.

“You’re all over the scene, pal.”

The dark eyes opened. They were filled with tears. “Ray was alive when I left. We were talking about living together. He was euphoric.
Euphoric
.” He said it again to feel the word in his mouth. “Do you know what it feels like to be completely happy?” he demanded.

Mike wasn’t sure that he did, so he didn’t answer.

“Well, that’s how Ray was when I left. I can’t imagine what happened after that.” He tried to shake away his tears, but they kept coming. “I just can’t imagine.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to find out.” Mike got up to leave.

The former assistant district attorney who had sought out a quieter life in the back office of an insurance company let his head fall into his hands and gave himself up to his sorrow. When Mike left, he didn’t say good-bye.

S
ergeant Joyce grabbed a fistful of hair with one hand as she studied the top piece of paper on the mountain of number-coded forms on her desk. She was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt with plump black hippopotamuses on it similar to the hippos on a tie often worn by the Police Commissioner at important news conferences. She appeared to be pulling the clump of hair out of her head as April arrived at her door.

April cleared her throat to get the Sergeant’s attention. Joyce glanced up, letting go of the yellow bundle, which did not flop down as normal hair would do but continued to stand straight out as if the woman were electrified.

“Got it?” she demanded.

“Yes.” April held out the envelope with the M.E.’s report on the cause of death of Raymond Cowles in it but remained in the doorway. She didn’t exactly trust her supervisor and wished Sanchez would hurry it up in the men’s room so they could do this thing together and get it over with. She edged her arm around so she had a view of her watch without seeming to be anxious about time. Fifteen minutes it took him. What was he doing? The man took longer in the bathroom than she did.

“Useful?” Joyce demanded, eyes on the envelope.

April nodded. Very useful. “I think you’ll be pleased.”

“Come in then and give it over.”

The furrows between Sergeant Joyce’s drawn-on eyebrows eased up on her a little and her small grim mouth curled into something resembling a smile. Clearing the Cowles case in less than a week would be a very good thing. She waved her hand toward the two empty chairs in front of her desk, but April preferred her usual spot by the window. She handed over the manila envelope as she headed across the tiny office to the window, where she checked out the vital signs of the three plants spread across the sill.

Recently Sergeant Joyce had added a new plant to the two dusty ivies. It was a fernlike thing that had started to die almost the minute it arrived. The length of brown on the spiky ends increased every day. April saw that soon it would be as dead as Raymond Cowles. She edged her finger into the dirt, thinking of Lorna Cowles’s lush, moist garden. Lorna sure knew a lot more about plants than men. The dirt in the asparagus fern was dry as a desert and filled with cigarette butts. April withdrew her finger hastily.

Mike slipped in while the Sergeant was reading. He sat in the chair closest to the door, his face thoughtful. Sergeant Joyce got to the relevant parts and started to mutter.

“Perianal scarring, evidence of perianal infection. Looks like he was into it for a while. Broken collarbone, very old, possibly a childhood injury. Hah, his arteries were not in good shape.” Sergeant Joyce had the front clump of hair back in her fist.

“Look at the alcohol and Kaminex levels in his blood,” Mike said.

“Uh-huh. Certainly could be a suicide. He had enough to relax, but probably not enough to pass out before he got the job done.”

“He was HIV negative,” April threw in. Which meant Cowles hadn’t been motivated by the fear of a long and nasty decline followed by a horrible death.

“Yeah.” Sergeant Joyce threw down the report. “No evidence of foul play.” She glared at them. “Doesn’t mean someone didn’t help him out, though. What do you say?”

Mike stroked his mustache, doubtful. “His boyfriend, Tom White, swears Cowles was euphoric when he left Sunday night. Said they were making plans to live together.” He raised a crooked eyebrow. “Come out of the closet.”

“Maybe he couldn’t handle that.” April tapped her foot, eager to get away.

Mike shrugged.

“What about the wife?”

“There’s no evidence she was involved in any way. No witness to say she was ever in his apartment,” April said. “There’s nothing on her.” She went over it again, reviewing Lorna’s behavior in the light of her husband’s homosexuality, wondering as she did so how it must feel to be married to someone who preferred his physical life with a person of his own sex. She thought of the scarring and infection in Cowles’s anus, the stains on the sheets. The second was the giveaway of two men engaged in mutual masturbation. He clearly had done it before. Why end it this time? Shame? Had White been threatening to expose him if he didn’t come out of the closet? Did it matter?

She turned to Sanchez. He was gazing at her with the familiar pirate’s smile that said “I’ve got what you want and I’m waiting to give it to you.” Her stomach lurched and the blood rose to her cheeks. Sometimes Mike’s eyes became liquid smoke. Inside was an evil spirit that distracted her, made her wonder about things like her parents all those years ago in China. How did they choose each other and how did they feel, those two skinny people, modest as monks?

The Chinese were prudish, no doubt about that. They were too busy trying to survive to have much tolerance for the concept of love or romance. Marriage was business. For women, anyway. In old China men got to marry as many women as they could afford, do whatever they wanted to them. And the great reformer Chairman Mao had had no qualms about carrying on the tradition. He had hundreds of girls, liked them young, tired of them quickly, and needed new ones all the time. American Presidents seemed to be like that, too. Nobody bothered about love, and nobody ever died of shame. Why had Raymond Cowles done so in this day and age? And why did she have to be so tough?

Sergeant Joyce had caught her blush and was smirking. She enjoyed watching April squirm. Joyce returned to the question at hand. “So, Raymond dies around ten
P.M
. What time did the boyfriend leave?”

“He told me he left around nine. He had work to do.”

“So Raymond places a call to his shrink, either to tell her he’s getting married to a guy or to say he’s checking out. Did he speak to her?” Joyce demanded.

Mike and April exchanged glances. They hadn’t told Treadwell that her number was the last one Cowles had dialed. They purposely held back everything but the news he was dead.

“It doesn’t change the case for us, does it?” April asked.

Mike shook his head. “No, Forensics says he definitely prepared the bag by himself. His prints were on the inside and the outside, and there were some partials on the tape. He was really cool when he did it. He knew what he was doing, pleated it up all nice and tight, made it airtight. Then he must have taken the Kaminex. After a while he put the bag on his head, lay down on the bed, and went to sleep.”

Sergeant Joyce pursed her lips. “Anything we might have missed that could come back and bite us on the tail later?”

Mike shook his head again.

Joyce sighed. “Fine, that about ties it up on Cowles, then. Get the report in by tomorrow.”

April waited until Sanchez was out of the room before she pushed herself off the windowsill. Sergeant Joyce bent her head over her mountain of paperwork. April could see the Sergeant had moved on to something else. As far as she was concerned, the Raymond Cowles case was closed.

A
t eight-forty-five on Friday morning, Clara Treadwell entered the executive conference room next door to her office. She was as prepared as she would ever be for the meeting Ben Hartley had called to discuss the Raymond Cowles death. She set her leather folder with its datebook and notepad at her place at the head of the table. As she sat, she curled the tips of her fingers into a half-fist to test the cut in her palm.

The point of the sharp surgical knife had dug deep, and the wound still ached, but the real damage of the incident had gone much deeper. Clara was sure the scalpel and the condom—those profoundly symbolic objects, one slashed through the other—related directly to her intimate relationship years ago with Harold Dickey. Like most men of his generation, Harold had hated condoms, couldn’t stand having his manhood sheathed and had said so often. As for the scalpel, Harold liked to tell his students their most sacred duty was to scrape away the patient’s carefully built-up defenses
with the lightest possible touch of the scalpel
.

Now, this insane act of his seemed to be a direct accusation that Clara had wielded her doctor’s scalpel like a dagger and was personally responsible for a patient’s death. After all the opposition and difficulty Clara had experienced over the years as a chief executive, and as a beautiful and desirable woman endlessly bothered by lovers and husbands who wanted too much, never had anyone physically hurt her. And never had anyone made her so deeply furious. She could hardly bear to be in the same room with him.

And just on this Friday morning, when Clara was scheduled to get out of there, to leave for a Commission meeting in Washington and then have a quiet weekend in Sarasota with the Senator, Ben Hartley had to call this idiotic meeting. Clara pulled her tiny tape recorder out of her purse and fiddled with
it. She carried it with her everywhere and always took it out at the beginning of meetings. It amused her that no one knew when the recorder was on and when it was off, and no one ever dared to ask.

Ready, she glanced around the table at the three useless men whose jobs were to advise her. Max Goodrich, Vice Chairman of the Centre, who had been lurking outside her office when the police called on her and who now seemed dazed and unsure which way to blow in the wind; Ben Hartley, General Counsel, an inflated, elegantly dressed, silver-haired gentleman who looked as if he belonged in the State Department; and Harold Dickey, extravagantly pompous in his lack of importance, who had somehow invited himself. The fourth man at the table was the only one she had invited. Jason Frank had something to gain, so Clara felt he was the one she could count on.

Seething, Hartley stared at her, waiting for her nod to begin. She smiled at him.

“Calm down, Ben. Whatever’s bugging you can be dealt with,” she said soothingly.

“I don’t like surprises, Clara. You’ve thrown me some curves before, but this is a doozy.”

“Oh, come now, Ben. When has life at the Centre ever been anything but fat sizzling in the fire?”

“Clara, when a man I went to Harvard with thirty years ago calls me to tell me the chief administrator of my organization is being hounded by the police for a possible suicide in which she seems to be implicated—and this old friend’s company is about to sue the Centre, and you, for malpractice—and I don’t know a single thing about it … Well, I’d say that’s more than fat in the fire.”

“Now just a minute, Ben. I wasn’t
hounded
. The police came here to
inform
me of a death, and there’s absolutely no evidence at this time it was a suicide. It could have been accidental, it could have been a homicide. But whatever it was, I’m not in any way implicated. So let’s get the facts straight.”

“If you’re not implicated, what was your number doing in the memory of the dead man’s telephone?”

Clara frowned. “What are you talking about, Ben?”

“Didn’t the police tell you the last call made from Raymond Cowles’s apartment was to your home number?”

No, they hadn’t told her that. She didn’t know that, so how could he? Clara felt Harold’s accusing eyes burn her cheeks. She felt Ben was bluffing about the telephone thing and refused to let it intimidate her. “No. No one told me that. But there’s another false note right there. I never heard any such thing. It’s just not true.”

Max Goodrich looked appalled. “Let’s fix an agenda here. What are we here to talk—”

Hartley interrupted him. “Look, my job is to protect the hospital—and to protect Clara insofar as she is acting in the lawful course of her employment as an officer.”

Clara stared at him. “We’re aware of that, Ben. What’s your point?”

“Well, let’s put it this way. First scenario: The director of a hospital, driving a hospital-owned car on hospital business, hits a pedestrian. Second scenario: Clara Treadwell, who is the director of the hospital, drives her own car to the country for a weekend tryst with her lover and hits a pedestrian. In scenario one, the pedestrian may sue and recover from the hospital. In scenario two, the director is on her own.”

Clara touched her nails to her top lip. It was amazing how no matter how high a person climbed, and how big the support system for her seemed, none of it counted when there was a problem. She dropped her hand.

“I take your point, Counselor,” she said coldly.

“Now let me make this very plain. This is not a meeting of the Quality Assurance Committee.”

“Why not?” Max asked. “I thought that’s what we’re here for.”

“Because if there are complaints concerning the members of this committee or officers of the Centre, we have to consider
very carefully questions of conflict of interest as well as the rule, which I believe even psychiatrists accept, that investigators may not investigate themselves.”

“Look, there’s nothing here that deserves any attention out of the ordinary,” Clara interjected smoothly. “Raymond Cowles was a patient of mine when I was a resident here eighteen years ago. Harold Dickey was my supervisor. The patient’s treatment lasted for a period of nearly four years, was terminated in the normal way, and was successful in every respect.”